Keep getting the word out on the MD SCAWB

(SCAB = "So-called Assault Weapons Ban")

I see that several MD activists are hitting up ranges and gun shops with info on the AWB, even leaving literature. In once case, a pretty well known shop had no idea ABOUT THE 2007 awv!

If at all possible, stop by your local shop and SPREAD THE WORD.
Even better, leave them a flyer. MSI and some folks at MD Shooters have generated some pretty good one.

Link to the MD Shooters forum sticky with the linked flyers

Don't forget to tell EVERYONE you know that might care about this, especially fence-sitters. That's how I got my wife on our side.

Apologies to Del. Manno

When posting last night around midnight (no matter what this messed up Blogger clock says) about Del. Manno's attack on preemption, I got out of hand and rhetorically told Del. Manno to "STFU."

That was totally improper, no matter how disengenuous I think Manno was being.

I should have said:

Please come clean with the voters, Del. Manno.

This is a perfect example of how RKBA people get labeled "hair trigger wackos." The same could be said of blacks in the US, or the Irish in Belfast. When people are harassed long enough, it should be no surprise when they lash out verbally at a perceived attack on their rights or dignity.

Too bad there is no context when that happens, so you end up looking like a "hair trigger wacko."

Bill Richardson for Pres

I am calling an early favorite here: Richardson.

I can't stand Obama (all talk, no walk),
Hilary (all ambition, no principle), or any of the others.

Edwards? (crickets)

Clark? (the general who doesn't even know the characteristics of US army small arms?)

No Republicans appeal to me now, either (except maybe McCain).

Richardson is the best qualified for the job.

I have to hit the rack, but will expand on this later.

UK folks worry about new holocaust

LONDON (AFP) - Forty-one percent of Britons believe that an event like the Holocaust could happen in the country today, given the depth of intolerance and prejudice, according to a new survey.

Furthermore, 36 percent thought that most people would do nothing about it if it did happen, in a poll released ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day on Saturday.

Gee, what a surprise. As a US Marine, I had to try to mop up the aftermath of a genocidal civil war in Somalia, then pack up and head over to "monitor" another genocidal war in the former Yugoslavia, all the while "monitoring" a genocidal war in Rwanda, and again "monitoring" a genocidal Islamic-fascist insurgency in Algeria. Notice there wasn't much "acting" by my 1000+ contingent of Marines sitting a few hundred (or less) miles away.

The one lesson I learned: it can happen in any country, in any time frame, with the right spark. And your ass is on your own, despite your "progressive" beliefs that some authority figure will save you. Clueless wonders should benefit to know that three of the four conflicts I listed had government troops or their puppet paramilitaries doing the genocide. And the remaining one showed that the government was too busy trying to survive to be able to help individual citizens.

Algeria c.1993-94 was where this current Islamic-fascist vogue of beheading people started, BTW.

As for a similar conflict in the US, I am currently worried about the mood in some parts of the US against "Muzlims," sometimes bordering on scary enough that I am glad I could invoke Rule 5.56 if it came to that (and I'm not even Muslim). Hopefully it won't.

A big part of my 2d Amendment activism stems from feeling like the sheep that the wolves just voted on for dinner post 9-11. Nothing to bring religion like a like-changing event. Seeing that Sikh guy in the ICU on TV after getting "Muslim bashed" with a nail-studded board did it for me (and I'm not even Sikh).

A bigger worry right now is LA race war thing. It does NOT bode well since those gangs have franchised both their membership and their rivalries across the entire US. What is ironic is that "white supremacists" were accused of being most likely to try to start a "race war," but it is black and latinos who are actually fighting it.

Edited to add:

Here are some links to the LA thing:

International Herald Tribune article

NPR show "News & Notes"

Push to kill MD preemption

As bad as Maryland is, at least we have a weak preemption law that keeps so-called "progressive" areas from banning self-defense firearms for whatever specious reasons they may claim.

One current MoCo Council member Marc Elrich tried banning handguns in his former city (Takoma Park) when he was on the city council there. His reason? "If it saves one life, it's worth it." Thinking like that gets you a seat on the MoCo Council, I guess.

Too bad for Elrich that the MD courts told him and the other Takoma Park nutbars to go pound sand. Ever hear of the rights of the minority, dumbasses? A few years ago, PG county tried this attack on preemption and failed in legislative committee. With a new governor and a new crop of "progressives," who knows this year.

Anyway, one of Elrich's buddies, the newly elected Del. Manno, wants to exempt MoCo from MD gun law preemption. Manno says with a straight face that he has no idea what MoCO would do with the new power, but wants to give it an "option."
STFU, Manno. You know exactly what your buddies Elrich and Andrews (both quoted in the article)would do: turn MoCo into the next DC by banning everything except antique muskets.

Manno said that the 120,000 people he represents in District 19, which encompasses parts of northern Silver Spring, Wheaton, unincorporated Rockville, Aspen Hill and Leisure World, ‘‘are more progressive than any other county” and ‘‘support more aggressive efforts to cut down on challenges we face with gun violence.”

What could he mean by "aggressive efforts" beyond what MD already does to screw legal firearms owners? Gee, I wonder!

Never mind that MoCo residents actually average 1-2 self-defense shootings per year against home invaders. Never mind that MoCo is currently facing an average of one home invasion every 10 days. Never mind that no MoCo crime report I have seen ever involved a legal firearms owner misusing his or her firearm (and I see a lot every week).

Somehow, though, Manno thinks that banning legal firearms will stop illegal aliens from robbing armored cars, or stop 16 Y/O drug dealers from shooting undercover police officers posing as other drug dealers (two recent events cited in the article). Don't ask me, ask him. Here is what he says:

‘‘I’m not an anti-gun nut,” Manno said. ‘‘I support the constitutional Second Amendment rights. ... I do think there are commonsense measures that could be introduced to cut down on problems, instances of violence that exist [due to] illegal gun use.”

Yeah, that must be that "constitutional Second Amendment right to go duck hunting."

Luckily for me, one of my three delegates will actually listen to me when I contact his/her office. He/She is not clearly on our side, but at least I am heard and he/she actually responds to my concerns on gun laws or any other issues like getting rid of the immoral death penalty. Maybe that's why this person got a campaign contribution from me?

Here's a LTE in response to the preemption article (not published, either):

Like weeds in the garden, Maryland's anti-gun-owners arise each year in
the spring and introduce new "friends" that hamper the legislature's
business rather than get the people's work done. This year's seedling
is Del. Manno, who wants to allow Montgomery County to enact
legislation exceeding Maryland's already draconian firearm laws. The only way
Montgomery County could make Maryland's existing gun laws any tougher would be for it to enact a comprehensive firearms ban like Washington, D.C.

Manno's bill should be rejected for the same reason we don't let individual counties enact their own automobile inspection standards: serious public safety issues of
statewide concern should be addressed at the level of the state
legislature. Manno says that he would not tell Howard County what to
do,but I am pretty confident that he would be opposed to Washington or
Frederick counties opting out of the Maryland gun laws and enacting the
more reasonable firearms policies of Pennsylvania or Virginia (states
that have far lower crime rates than Maryland, by the way).

For an example of the disaster that comes from allowing a patchwork of local
gun control laws to exist, look no further than Illinois; Chicago is
currently undergoing an armed criminal epidemic while legal firearms
owners are routinely caught by "gotcha" local laws as they travel to
hunting grounds and shooting ranges, or even when they protect their
families in their own homes. Like those pesky weeds, Manno's bill needs
to be uprooted and discarded.

Maryland SCAWB

Read the article linked through the title and see what we are up against here. I wrote a LTE, but it didn't get published; some other guy did and got the same points across. Here is what I have to say (apologies for the crazy formatting after the cut-n-paste):

Sen. Lenett's wild claims in support of his proposed ban on so-called
"assault weapons" would be hilarious if not for the gravity of his extremist legislation. Or his misstatement of Constitutional law, something that is shocking coming from an elected official.

Despite Lenett's claims, his bill is much broader than the 1994 federal ban, and will be the most stringent firearm ban of any state in the country, save Washington, D.C. The opposite of narrowly tailored, Lenett's bill breathtakingly seeks to ban virtually all handguns sold in Maryland, as well as the most popular target-shooting rifles in the nation. Contrary to Lenett's claims, these to-be-banned firearms are no more dangerous than the few semi-automatic firearms spared from his ban. In fact, there is no functional difference in firepower between these banned and non-banned weapons; all types of semi-auto firearms require one pull of the trigger to fire one, and only one, round of ammunition. These are
definitely not machine guns, and it is ridiculous to assert that they "can spray bullets."

FBI statistics for 2005 show that Marylanders are about as likely to be beaten to death (18 victims), twice as likely to be bludgeoned to death (47 victims) or be more than three times as likely to be stabbed to death (68 victims), than be killed with any kind of rifle or shotgun (19 victims total). (Data is from
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_20.html)

Lenett is wrong when he alludes that Second Amendment may have something
to do with hunting. The weight of independent legal and historical scholarship over the past fifteen years has firmly concluded that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution protect a personal right to individual firearms ownership for self protection. Since fully automatic machine guns are considered to be rew-maintained "ordnance," and not individual firearms, they are not even relevant to the discussion of those Amendments, regardless of the attempts of the ban's supporters to blur the distinction between fully automatic and semi-automatic firearms (as evidenced by statements in the article).

Lennett's misguided bill should just be rejected.

That, in a nutshell is why this bill is FUBAR. It seems that hundreds of people are going to show up in Annapolis this year to oppose this bill. It should be a rollin' time . . ..

Lot going on in MD

We have a new governor who supposedly "Respects the 2d Amendment" but supports a ban on all semi-auto handguns and most rifles.

We also have a new crop of anti-gun-owner legislators who have come out with both barrels blazing. We are fighting the above mentioned ban on so-called "Assault weapons" as well as a new push to let counties ban guns if they want. Interesting times here in MD.

I apologize for the sporadic posting. I have to get SOME work done during the day . . ..

Kevin P sums it up

Re: this bogus "new" Harvard study that tries to claim that more guns automatically equal more crime, Kevin P. leaves a comment in Deltoid that reflects my thoughts on the whole issue:

I have a Master's degree in Chemical Engineering and work in the semiconductor industry. As a process engineer, I routinely used statistically designed experiments to improve process and chip performance. I rapidly learned that you can easily play with your statistical models to tell you whatever you would like to hear.

In my line of work, it was easy to verify the model by running a new experiment on actual living and breathing wafers. This kept everyone honest.

This unfortunately does not apply to the social sciences. You (usually) cannot run a verification experiment to prove that your model was correct. In this particular case, that would involve actually enumerating gun ownership by visiting and searching every private home in the target area. This is of course impossible - you can't search even a single home without a warrant. The study then is unverifiable. I suspect that most social science is like this but we don't hear much about it because many of these studies may be on uncontroversial subjects.

But this is of course on the subject of gun control. There is a systematic effort, funded by the Joyce Foundation in recent years to the tune of millions of dollars to investigate the private lawful ownership of guns contributes to crime. Coincidentally, almost all of these studies find that private lawful gun ownership contributes to crime, and recommends various gun control methods. The entire field has become poisoned. While it is possible to find honest scholarship in this area, Joyce Foundation studies are not the place to go looking for them.

Furthermore, if a study contradicts real world experience, it must be able to explain the contradiction in a compelling way. In my real world experience, the gun culture is composed of tens of millions of law abiding Americans who take responsible care of their firearms. A very small number of criminals, concentrated in geographic and demographic areas are responsible for the vast majority of crime. Studies conducted in the liberal bubble of Harvard, far removed from the gun culture of America lack any kind of real world experience or perspective. Unsurprisingly, their findings mirror their authors' prejudices (and their funders' desires).

Real science will get your Boyle's law, which is applicable throughout the universe. So-called "gun violence research" is not "science" because you can always find examples that contradict the supposed rule. EX: anti-gun-owner New Jersey has the statistically identical homicide rate of pro-gun-owner Florida, even though Florida has a higher poverty-ridden population, and has more people living in urbanized areas than are in the entire state of New Jersey.

great thought from View From The Porch

The sophisticated Blue State city-dwelling agnostic may mock the tent-revival evangelical's belief that "With God, everything is possible", yet he somehow leaves unexamined the fact that he believes the same thing, except that "God" is replaced by "legislative fiat". Feel unsafe around harbors? Worried that the bad guys might try to smuggle something in? Just pass a law decreeing that every single container entering every single seaport in the US must be physically inspected. Never mind how, never mind that it will make US ports look like the DC Beltway at 5:15 on a Friday afternoon; it's the law. Just make it happen. Anguished over folks not making enough money? Pass a law raising minimum wage. Never mind where employers are going to come up with this money (Hint: layoffs and price increases), just make everybody un-poor, and do it now. This belief in show-of-hands metaphysics, this idea that reality can be changed by a simple House Resolution and a big dollop of earnestness, doesn't just annoy me, it sets a vein bouncing in my forehead.